New mum whose cancer was dismissed as breastfeeding pain is fundraising for lifesaving treatment after NHS tells her it’s now incurable

Louise Gleadell, 37, felt dizzy after her youngest son was born, but was told to stop thinking about it

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By HANNAH FERRETT

12th February 2017,4:46 pm

Updated: 12th February 2017,5:02 pm

A MUM-of-three with cancer has been forced to tell her young children she could die after doctors initially dismissed her symptoms as tiredness and breastfeeding pain.

Louise Gleadell, 37, from Leicester was eventually diagnosed with stage 2B cervical cancer in February last year, when her son Jude, with partner Matt Rawson, was just nine months old. She is also mum to Joseph, 12, and 10-year-old Mateo.

One of the most helpful things the charity did for Louise was help her get a grant to help towards Jude’s nursery fees, as she was advised to have help caring for him when she was being treated as it would be so hard on her.

Louise added: “Two weeks after I finished I started feeling a bit more normal. I knew I felt weak and tired when I was going through treatment, but I didn’t realise how actually awful I felt until I started feeling a little bit normal again.”

Not long after she decided to take part in Macmillan’s OutRun, which saw her covering 30 miles in 30 days for the charity.

“It’s easy when you’ve got children to put yourself to the back of the pile and not take that time out,” she said.

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"I’d felt so weak and physically drained when I was on treatment, it was like something had been taken away from me.

"It was mission impossible to unscrew the cap on a bottle of water.

"I saw that and thought I can do that – 30 miles over a month, it’s a mile a day. It was time for me."

Then in October 2016 came the news that Louise was most concerned about - her cancer had spread to her left sub clavicular lymph node and her original cervical tumour had only had a partial response to treatment.

"At that point I was told the cancer was now incurable and we would start a three-week course of radiotherapy to my neck the next option after that was chemo as a palliative measure to try and control and minimise the spread," she said.